Bertie is the daughter of renowned Australian artist Charles Blackman and grew up in the eastern Sydney suburbs of Bondi and Paddington. She rose to fame with her debut album in 2004, entitled Headway which came after years of prolific performances around Sydney”s Inner city venues, where she developed a dedicated following. International Grammar School. She began playing African percussion at the age of twelve and guitar at the age of fifteen.

Music was a way to establish herself as an artist in her own right. (Her mother, Genevieve de Couvreur, is also a painter.) Her first publicly accessible visual art was in the form of a book of illustrations that appeared with her fourth album, Pope Innocent X.

“As soon as I did that I just kept drawing and drawing and drawing,” Blackman says. “Visual art for me before was more of a means to write songs, whereas now I’ve been doing more painting and drawing than music lately.”

Blackman’s work – ink on paper, mostly monochrome but with the odd flash of colour – shares filmmaker Tim Burton’s sense of the gothic tinged with innocence, but is also distinctly her own. (She counts composer and long-time Tim Burton collaborator Danny Elfman among her friends, and made a cameo vocal appearance at the Adelaide Festival when Elfman toured Songs From Tim Burton.”